That certainly fits with my experience. (I think I shared this already in a different context, so sorry if it’s a repeat, but …) For exercise, I used to walk the loop trail on the Stanford campus, around the radio dish. It’s about 3 miles and takes about an hour to walk. I used to note/grumble about how rarely the oncoming pedestrians would make eye contact - as if they were too self-absorbed or maybe just defensive. I noted that on the entire walk, an average of two people or groups would make eye contact as they passed. Being sort of self-absorbed myself, I resolved to try an experiment: as I went about my day, in all public contexts, I would try to make eye-contact and smile at four strangers per day. (I kept a log of it to be sure.) That was fun in itself but more mysteriously, over time it seemed to affect others as well. On the Dish Hill walk for example, I was now exchanging eye-contact and smiles with 10-11 people per circuit rather than 2. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing anything to call additional attention to myself. It really seemed there was some metaphysical connection that got amplified. Anway, try it yourself - it can’t hurt!